musical musings from the frozen north:
torontopia, mont royal city and kawartha kottages

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Alabama Shakes - Sound and Color

Alabama Shakes – Sound and Color (ATO)

There’s one good reason—and only one—why, in 2011, this band
shot from obscurity to festival headliner in the space of a year: the voice of
Brittany Howard. This now-25-year-old sounds like a woman at least twice her
age and steeped in Southern traditions of gospel and blues. That she is a woman
of colour playing electric guitar and fronting a white rock band stands out all
the more in the incredibly segregated world of American music. Of course she’s going to turn heads.
That she looks like a nerdy librarian while testifying like Otis Redding sets
her even further apart.

And yet what we heard on the 2012 debut, Boys and Girls, was sadly unremarkable: no better or worse than any
local bar band.

That’s changed. Big time. Sound
and Color is an immense leap forward on every level: almost a complete
reinvention, a revelation by a group far more eclectic than they had previously
let on.

Considering Howard’s star wattage, she no doubt faced external pressure
to ditch the dudes and go it alone. Thank god she didn’t: years of touring have
developed an incredible chemistry, a genuine understanding of interplay and
dynamics. They’re also simply better as technical players, especially drummer
Steve Johnson. Listen to “Give Me All Your Love”—which on the one hand is one
of the most astounding vocal performances you’re likely to hear this year, in
which a wailing Howard could make Robert Plant weep like a baby—where every
instrument’s role is as integral in the song’s emotional heft.

Sound and Color opens with the sound
of—wait a minute, what? Vibraphone and upright bass. Then, over a slow,
syncopated beat and a string section, Howard slips into a sonic rapture,
emulating Prince and Al Green, singing about synaesthesia and sounding
splendorous while doing so. It’s slow-burn, psychedelic soul, and it’s your
first clue that this is not a garage rock record.

The punchy second track, “I Don’t Want To Fight,” starts the
party proper. It sounds like something Jack White would produce for Amy
Winehouse, until the beat drops and Howard enters with a high, pained rasp—not
unlike Janis Joplin, the singer to whom she’s most often compared, somewhat
inexplicably. (Bluesy woman fronting a rock band? Apparently there was only
ever one.) But it’s a dodge: Howard’s not going there. For starters, she’s not
a one-trick pony. Her voice explores masculine depths and what sounds like
soaring falsetto—many of the slow jams here owe some debts to fellow Southern
soul space cadets D’Angelo and Erykah Badu. She snarls like the Strokes on “The
Greatest”; she slinks like Norah Jones on “This Feeling.” Is there anything she
can’t do?

The music keeps you guessing: just when you think it’s going to
be an R&B record, some Southern rock takes over. Just when you think it’s
going to be ballad-heavy, a rave-up comes next. On the penultimate track “Gemini,”
things get downright spacey and trippy for more than six minutes, like a
Funkadelic deep cut, culminating in a fuzzed-out, droning guitar solo.

The album closes with Howard singing about how she’s “loving so
deeply I’m in over my head.” It’s hard to imagine how a woman this massively
talented fronting a band this good could ever be in anything over her head.
Full control, full confidence, moving forward.